David Family Practical Jokes

Originally published November 17, 1995, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1148

And now, something completely different. Something completely silly. Something having zero to do with comics, but hey, sue me, it’s my column (despite the occasional letters we get taking us to task because of what this column is supposed to be, as if there was a mandate that I was blowing off.)

It’s time for:

DAVID FAMILY PRACTICAL JOKES

Deep from our hidden history: Things that various members of the David family has done from time to time to ease the boredom of life’s little routines.

I started young. Once Sunday morning, when I was about fourteen, I decided it would be interesting to see if I could scare my father completely out of his wits. I knew my mother was a lost cause; our minds ran in directions that were too similar, and no matter what I did, she’d be impossible to catch off guard. But my dad was fair game.

My kid sister Ronni, who was two at the time, had a doll she called Mary Jane. Mary Jane was a huge doll, plastic, several feet tall. She was, in point of fact, exactly the same height as my sister.

I got my hands on Mary Jane, outfitted her in one of Ronni’s footed sleeping bags, then got some ketchup from the fridge and smeared it on her throat. I propped the doll against the door of my parents’ bedroom, tilting it at about an 70 degree angle.

Then I knocked and stepped out of sight.

My father, as I’d hoped, opened the door. Mary Jane fell face first into the room, like something out of Psycho.

I’ve never heard my father scream quite as loudly. Nor did I ever seem him move as quickly. He vaulted backwards across the bedroom, almost smashing through the wall and leaving an outline like something out of a Warners cartoon. My mother, who was seated on the bed reading the newspaper, was far enough away that she wasn’t fooled for a microsecond. She howled with laughter. My father, in the meantime, had to be peeled off the ceiling.

I was grounded for two days.

It was worth it. Besides, my social life was nonexistent back then, so it’s not like it was any major blow.

My eldest daughter, Shana, is carrying on this wonderful tradition of tormenting others. But she does it in a slightly less sadistic, more mind-destroying manner. To her, school is filled with lab rats on whom she can experiment, mucking with their brains and sense of reality.

Her current favorite stunt is to pick a likely victim and say, with utter conviction, “You want to hear something amazing? The word ‘gullible’ isn’t in the dictionary.”

“Yes it is,” says the victim. But if they say it with the slightest hesitancy, Shana quickly moves in for the kill.

“No, it’s not. Seriously,” says Shana. “Everybody uses it, but it’s not a real word. ‘Gullible’ is not in the dictionary.”

There have actually been several suckers who wound up hauling out a dictionary to check for themselves. And when the word is found, they hold it up to Shana to prove something to her. Which, of course, they do. They prove they’re gullible.

Shana also told me how she was in the library the other day, and some aged librarian spoke over the public address system (yes, the library has a P.A. system) “Mike Groin… please meet your party at the front desk… Mike Groin…”

Wonder if Ðìçk Hertz was along for the ride.

Early on in my two-job stint at a law school, a new guy started delivering mail. I greeted him in the morning at the law journal… and then, later on, I spilled juice on my shirt. I got a different shirt, changed into it, and went to my afternoon job… and the same guy came to deliver mail to The Commentator that afternoon. He stared at me. “Weren’t you at the law journal this morning? But dressed differently?”

“Ahhh… that’s my twin brother. We get that all the time,” I said.

Completely convinced him. Of course, I did have to start wearing two different shirts every day, so I was going through laundry twice as fast. But sometimes one has to suffer for one’s art.

During the summer at New York University was when it was the quietest. Most of the students were gone; there was perhaps a handful still around. Nevertheless the law school and all ancillary offices remained open. Which meant I still had my job. It was a great job in that the phone rang perhaps once, twice a day. And that was pretty much it.

I got a lot of writing done. Nothing I’d especially want to see the light of day anymore, but still, it was practice.

Nevertheless, with no one to talk to and nothing to do except self-generated work, I was bored from time to time.

One day, while looking out the window, I noticed a pay phone on the street below. Don’t know why I never noticed it before. But there it was.

A pay phone.

Opportunity for harmless fun.

I went out to the street, jotted down the phone number of the pay phone, went back to the office, and dialed it.

And waited.

I could tell from the reactions of passersby that the phone was ringing. They would slow, look at it, look left and right, then shrug and keep going. Didn’t matter to me; I had the entire summer to wait.

As it turned out, I didn’t need to wait more than two minutes.

A mail man, looking rather snappy in his crisp United States Postal Service uniform, was pushing along one of those little wheeled mail trucks with several mail bags hanging from them. He stopped, stared at the phone, and then picked it up.

“Hello?”

“Yes, hello,” I said, sounding slightly rushed. “Can you tell me how much it will cost to send a five pound package to Yugoslavia?”

“Excuse me?”

I repeated the question, settling into my seat.

“Well, sir… this isn’t the post office,” he told me.

“It’s not?”

“No.”

“This isn’t the 34th Street post office?”

“No, it’s not.”

“Is this…” and I read the phone number back to him.

He looked at the phone number on the dial.

(Nowadays pay phones often don’t have the number on them, to prevent people calling back so that the original caller doesn’t have to keep plunking money into the pay phone. As if the phone company doesn’t make enough money. Think about it: Once upon a time, there was such a thing as an incomplete call. You’d call and no one was home, so the phone would just ring until you hung up. Or you’d get a busy signal. Either way you wouldn’t get charged. But now the percentage of incomplete calls must be staggeringly small. People have answering machines. Or call waiting. These things are so common that when no one picks up or you get a busy signal, it’s actually a surprise, even an inconvenience. That being the case, the phone company must just be raking it in. No wonder they can afford to fight over discount structures. Volume must be through the roof. Oh, and Whoopi Goldberg of those MCI commercials, if you’re reading this: It’s tooches with a rolling gutteral “ch,” not tookis. And you call yourself a Jew. But I digress…)

So he looked at the number on the dial and said, “Yes, that’s the right number.”

“Well, this is the number information gave me for the 34th Street post office. And I really need to know how much postage to put on this five pound package for Yugoslavia.”

“I’m sorry, sir, this really isn’t the post office. It’s a pay phone on Bleeker Street.”

“What?”

“A pay phone on Bleeker Street.”

I considered that a moment. “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

“No, sir, really…”

“You guys are just having fun with me over there. Okay, joke’s over. I really need to know how much to send this package to Yugoslavia…”

“Sir, this really isn’t the post office. It’s a pay phone.”

I paused. “Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“You’re telling me this is a pay phone.”

“That’s right,” he said, sounding relieved. He was about to finish this absurd call.”

“You’re telling me this is not the 34th Street post office.”

“That is correct.”

I paused, and then tossed down my trump card. “You’re telling me you don’t work for the postal service?”

Dead silence. I held my breath. Would he lie to get out of it?

“Well,” he began, and I knew I had him. “Well, actually… I do work for the postal service…”

“So this is the 34th Street post office, then!” I said triumphantly.

I think he was about to cry. To this day I’m amazed he didn’t hang up. “No… no, it’s not,” he said in a pleading voice, “really it’s not. I’m a mailman.”

“A mailman.”

“That’s right.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said, “you’re a mailman… making your rounds, walking down Bleeker Street… and you’ve stopped everything to pick up a ringing pay phone and talk to me?”

“That’s right.”

“Jeez!” I said in outrage. “No wonder it takes forever to get my mail!” And I hung up.

Have you ever seen one of those moments in a movie when someone stares at a phone receiver, in their hand, long after the person on the other end has hung up?

You have no idea how weird that looks when someone does it in real life.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. He wants it known that he’d never pull such foolishness now; the last thing we need is more disgruntled postal workers.)